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As one of our modern English critics has said: "His philosophy is that of the market-place rather than of the schools; he does not move among high ideals or subtle emotions.... He carried on and perfected the native Roman growth, satire, so as to make Roman life from day to day, in city and country, live anew under his pen.... Before Horace, Latin lyric poetry is represented almost wholly by the brilliant but technically immature poems of Catullus; after him it ceases to exist."
I find that by choosing and adapting metres from the Greek fountain and not sticking to Horace, or even to Catullus, the language admits of translation from English closer than I at all conceived. I think I have done 1500 lines in all. I only translate short pieces and pleasing ones. I have been led to it by a practical object.
The letters of Marc Anthony; the speeches of Brutus, are full of reproaches, and recriminations against Augustus; false in truth, but urged with signal asperity: the poems of Bibaculus and those of Catullus, stuffed with virulent satires against the Caesars, are still read.
Phoebus, gilding the brow o' morning, Banishes ilk darksome shade! Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus, Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted. But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the thrush would have been untaught in 'the style of the Bird of Paradise.
But, with submission, I think the remark I have here made shows us that this unworthy treatment made an impression upon his mind, though he had been too wise to discover it. When Julius Caesar was lampooned by Catullus, he invited him to a supper, and treated him with such a generous civility, that he made the poet his friend ever after.
It was this that stirred Cicero's ire, and Cicero did not hesitate to expose the man's career. Vergil's lampoon is interesting then not only in its connections with Catullus and the poet's own boyhood memories, but for its reminiscences of Cicero's speeches and the revelation of his own sympathies in the partizan struggle.
There was the comparatively simple continuous treatment of the metre seen in Catullus and Virgil, who are content to follow the Greek rhythm, and there was the more rhetorical and pointed style first beginning to appear in Tibullus, carried a step further in Propertius, and culminating in the epigrammatic couplet of Ovid.
He who has the servant, as we say at home, has also the wagon and the oxen; and I reminded him of the verse of Catullus: 'Tu quoque fac simile: ars deluditur arte."
"And so, friends," said the doctor, "a thing which would merely give pain to most women might kill my Ursula. Ah! when I am no longer here, I charge you to see that the hedge of which Catullus spoke, 'Ut flos, etc., a protecting hedge is raised between this cherished flower and the world." "And yet those ladies flattered you, Ursula," said Monsieur Bongrand, smiling.
In earlier life he was one of the circle of Catullus, and after Cicero's death was one of the chief friends of Atticus, of whom a brief biography, which he wrote after Atticus' death, is still extant. Unlike Sallust, Nepos never took part in public affairs, but carried on throughout a long life the part of a man of letters, honest and kindly, but without any striking originality or ability.
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